The project proposes to exploit the Internet of Things (IoT) technology for building management and energy conservation. Most of the existing building automation systems focus on providing comfort, light and safety. In order to achieve intelligence in smart buildings for energy conservation and better management, the environment awareness and collaboration in building subsystems are necessary features which are in turn dependent upon the connectivity of various components with Internet and among each other with a standardized interfacing. IoT can provide such standardized means for interconnecting the physical objects with each other. Thus in this project, our goal will be to develop IoT based smart building named as iBuilding (both residential and commercial purposes), that will enable connectivity of home appliances and subsystems, while providing the monitoring, analyzing, controlling and surveillance without human intervention. Using IoT, the system will allow the intelligent control of these appliances and will also learn and predict the needs and preferences of building occupants such as lighting and temperature requirements and other services, thus resulting in energy savings through targeted supply, providing ease of usage for building occupants and enhancing their overall experience of life. Moreover, the proposed iBuilding system will enable occupants and building operators to interact with the system, facilitate them to compose innovative services and also enable them to develop on-demand user defined applications.

Moreover, if the smart home is managed by an inverter system and powered by hybrid energy sources (such as solar, battery and/or generator), then the electricity cost can be further reduced by optimally scheduling the electricity appliaces load on the available power sources through the inverter system considering the electricity usage in peak load hours. Thus another crucial goal of this project is to develop a hybrid power monitoring and control system in which a smart solar inverter monitoring device (named as invertlyzer) is conceived to acquire the information about different parameters such as solar voltage/amperes, grid input voltage, inverter ambient temperature, battery voltage and charging speed among others. The acquired data will be sent to the cloud server where the optimization techniques and scheduling algorithms will be developed and employed in order to improve the overall performance of solar PV system. The proposed system will reduce the under-utilization of available green energy sources by smartly scheduling different electrical devices/appliances when the solar energy is maximally available. It will also increase the lifetime of battery by monitoring and controlling the various associated parameters such as battery charging speed, its temperature, charging voltage, charging depth, etc.